Hetty (30 page)

Ned and Mabel sailed from New York, down the Atlantic coast and around to the Gulf, stopping at ports along the way and making a stir wherever they landed. In Charleston, reporters tried in vain for interviews. In Galveston, the Greens picked up friends from Texas and Chicago and spent a week fishing and cruising. Ned and Mabel had used the
United States
for barely two years when it met its doom in perhaps the least violent shipwreck in history. Anchored in the tranquil waters of Padanaram Harbor, near Round Hill, the old Howland estate at South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the ship swung slowly around and struck a rock. The hull filled with water slowly enough to allow passengers to leave the sinking ship unharmed. Most of the furnishings were saved, but the ship was lost, lying like a dying whale on its side in sixteen feet of water. The wreck of the
United States
barely registered on Ned’s balance sheets. Already his restless imagination was leading him to other pursuits.

Ned had spent little time in New Bedford and South Dartmouth before he was in his fifties. And Sylvia had never shown much interest in family history, either, but now Ned decided to
return to Round Hill, the old family estate. He had no desire to occupy the historic but by now dilapidated farmhouse. Instead, he set about planning and building an immense mansion and estate, costing $1.5 million, set on the 110 acres he’d inherited from his mother. Sylvia, who by rights owned half of the estate, did not object, but showed about as much interest in developing Round Hill as she did in her own family history. Ned acquired an additional 140 acres in the area, giving him 250 acres to play with.

The house, completed in 1921, was an enormous limestone-and-marble palace, three stories high, with sixty rooms. Just to the left of the tiled entranceway was an elevator, and in the center a large, curved hallway. Ned filled the house with the fruits of a breathtaking collecting spree. He collected with abandon, with unrestrained zeal, as if he were trying to buy his way to happiness. He bought shelf after shelf of books from Good-speed’s Book Shop in Boston. That fortunate seller routinely alerted Ned to rare and valuable volumes available. Ned was an avid buyer but not indiscriminate—the surviving correspondence between Ned and Goodspeed’s shows him buying heavily in books on the history of New Bedford, whaling, and New England, returning books when Goodspeed sent him an incorrect volume. He paid $110 for a first edition of Samuel Johnson’s great Dictionary
of the English Language;
$962.50 for a 151-volume, blue-cloth-bound set published by the Hackluyt Society, devoted to maritime exploration, covering 1847–1923; and he paid $1,000 for a volume on Sir Francis Drake, published in 1626.

He collected jewelry by the bin, more than Mabel could have worn in a thousand lifetimes. A surviving appraisal of his jewelry purchases covers dozens of ledger-sized pages. There was a double bracelet with a half-moon diamond, for which he paid $18,000; a 6.86-karat ring for $28,000; a solitaire pendant purchased for $15,200; a diamond necklace and brooch for $2,700; and the list goes on and on. He collected rare stamps and coins by the thousand. To this day, Ned remains something of a legend among stamp collectors for purchasing the original 100-stamp
sheet of perhaps the most famous and rare misprint ever, the 1918 upside-down biplane known as the “Inverted Jenny.” They are worth about $150,000 per stamp today. Ned broke off most of the sheet individually and sold them to friends, but he had one placed in a locket for Mabel. Coin collectors know him for owning all five 1913 Liberty “V-Nickels.”

But his interests didn’t end there. He owned a large collection of erotic pictures, many of them on glass negatives, and the enormous dried penis of a whale, which he displayed prominently at the entrance to the mansion, where it loomed over guests who, to Ned’s delight, had no idea what it was. A statue of a naked female stood in the foyer, clutching a fishing pole whose line dangled into the cavity of a gold spittoon.

Despite all of his spending, Ned did not, as is sometimes suggested, blow through his mother’s fortune. In fact, he proved to be a fairly able custodian of the principal that she left to him and to Sylvia. He did not double, triple, or quadruple the money, as his mother would no doubt have done. It was perhaps among his graces that he realized enough was enough. He lacked Hetty’s burning drive to acquire money, and was instead interested in finding ever more creative ways to spend it. But he was careful not to squander the principal. The several million dollars he received in annual interest was more than enough income to cover even his most expensive hobbies and interests. Wilbur Potter, in the offices at 111 Broadway, continued to handle investments for Hetty’s estate, but he cleared purchases of securities through Ned.

Correspondence between Ned and his New York brokers, R. L. Day and Company, reveals him to be an active investor. He stayed true to his mother’s formula of maintaining conservative investments and copious reserves of cash, and was able to navigate the Great Depression more or less unscathed. During the Depression he bought stock, in keeping with Hetty’s dictum to buy when everyone else is selling. R. L. Day sent him detailed reports on blue-chip companies such as Otis Elevator
and AT&T. On a single day in June of 1930, eight months after the stock market crash, Ned spent more than $250,000 for 295 shares of AT&T, 500 shares of Chase National Bank, and 1,400 shares of Southern Pacific, the company once owned by his mother’s mortal enemy, Collis P. Huntington. In 1928, Ned had sold his beloved Texas Midland Railroad to Southern Pacific. His financial timing was impeccable, a trait that was clearly passed on to him from his mother and grandfather, Edward Mott Robinson. Shortly after the sale, Walter P. Allen, his old banker from Terrell, wrote to tell him that new, hard-surfaced roads were sprouting all over the state, carrying an influx of trucks and passenger buses along the same route as rail tracks. “I think you sold the Midland just in time,” Allen wrote. The union of the Midland and the Southern Pacific added a final coda to the long feud between Hetty and Huntington.

Ned also continued to use the Round Hill property to explore a spectacular array of interests, sometimes to the chagrin of neighbors. He had a keen eye for emerging technologies and developments. In 1923, he took out a license to operate a radio station on the property. He lavished money on the enterprise, turning it into one of the most technologically advanced stations in the country. Just to the right of the mansion, he built a studio with a fully equipped music room. The station generated a signal strong enough to be picked up by radio operators in England. For the benefit of the many people who did not have radio in those days, Ned had radio features broadcast by amplifiers around the property, and invited the public to come listen. They arrived in droves. As many as 15,000 people turned out on September 14, 1923, to hear an announcer describe boxer Jack Dempsey’s pummeling of Luis Firpo. Cars jamming Smith Neck Road at the entrance to the estate created what historian Elliott Burris Knowlton called “one of the greatest traffic jams in South Dartmouth history.”

Like Jay Gatsby, Ned loved to throw open his gates to the public. They flocked to his beach in the summertime. Knowlton quoted a grounds superintendent describing the typical scene: “The noise was awful, between blast of music from WMAF, Klaxons honking, kids screaming, and hawkers selling hot dogs, balloons and Bon Ami. They used the Bon Ami to sprinkle on car windows so that they couldn’t be seen when they got undressed to get into their bathing suits.”

With his combination of inquisitive mind and unlimited resources, Ned threw money at everything that interested him. In 1929, he paid $8,400 for a custom-made Rauch and Lang Electric Brougham, which he ordered through a Boston car dealer. The car had an extra-tall passenger compartment—it stood a full six inches higher than Ned’s head, with tall doors that made it easy for him to get in and out without stooping. He rode about the estate in this car, greeting visitors and checking on various operations. But his fascination with cars was already giving way to a new passion: aviation. Though not a pilot himself, he built a large airstrip and hangar near the beach. He set up a training school for pilots and for years operated one of the most modern and well-equipped airports on the East Coast. It was among the first airports with lit runways for night landings. Round Hill attracted visits from aviation luminaries ranging from Charles Lindbergh to the original Goodyear blimp. He built a hangar capable of sheltering the blimp and several airplanes at once.

Ned built large greenhouses to provide his mansion with fresh flowers and exotic plants. He invited scientists to the estate and funded experiments in aviation, radio, and early television. Engineers used WMAF’s powerful transmitters to communicate with Admiral Richard E. Byrd during his Antarctic expedition of 1928–30. From 1925 until Ned’s death eleven years later, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lived and worked at Round Hill. In the early 1930s, MIT professor Robert J. Van de Graf built a prototype “atom smasher” at Round Hill. The device couldn’t, as it turned out, split the atom, but it did generate
prodigious electricity. On November 27, 1933, a large crowd gathered to watch as the machine generated 7 million volts of electricity. “No Fourth of July fireworks exhibit ever approached this in spectacular, indescribable splendor,” the New Bedford
Standard-Times
gushed the next day
*

When Ned learned that the famous whaling ship
Charles
W Morgan was falling into disrepair, he bought it, restored it, and put it on display at Round Hill. Launched in 1841, the Morgan had been owned by his great-grandfather, Isaac Howland Jr., proprietor of the whaling company. During its storied, eighty-year career, the Morgan had completed thirty-seven voyages. Ned opened the ship to tens of thousands of tourists each year. Five years after Ned’s death, in 1941, the Morgan would be towed to Mystic, Connecticut, where it remains a featured attraction of the Mystic Seaport Museum.

The great Round Hill circus, with its endless cacophony of sound and light, airplane motors, atom smashers, screaming bathers, floodlit runways, music, the
thwack
of boxing gloves amplified by a dozen loudspeakers and made audible for miles around, was all too much for the wealthy owners of nearby summer estates. They had come for the peace and quiet of shore summers, for sanctuary from the heat and noise of Boston and New York. And, it must be said, they were accustomed to seeing local residents mainly when they arrived to trim the hedges, paint the portico, or deliver groceries—not as hot dog-eating, Bon Ami-sprinkling fun-seekers frolicking in the sun. Weren’t there public beaches for them … elsewhere? Owners of nearby summer homes complained at public hearings and signed petitions trying to enforce some quiet at Round Hill.

The Colonel made a few token concessions—airplanes would fly no lower than 1,000 feet over neighboring houses—but mainly the complaints delighted him. He never cared much for stuffed
shirts, anyway. “It’s just another sport—complaining about me,” the
American Magazine
quoted him as saying in 1933. “In the morning they swim, in the afternoon they play golf, and at night they talk about Colonel Green.”

For a warm-weather retreat, the Colonel built a fabulous, $600,000 estate at Star Island, in Biscayne Bay near Miami Beach. He had first come to Florida on the advice of a physician. He lived in hotels and, later, on a magnificent houseboat docked next to his property, until the house was completed in 1927. That part of Miami was attracting more and more conspicuously wealthy people, some of them notorious. Just across the water from the Colonel sat the compound of gangster Al Capone. The Colonel and Mabel became familiar figures in Miami, throwing lavish parties and motoring around town in a chauffeur-driven car. They spent about four months of each year there, but the Colonel never established residency in Florida. He followed his mother’s example of moving about frequently, as a way of thwarting tax collectors. He never established residency in Massachusetts, or in New York, where he frequently stayed When pressed, he continued to claim Texas as his legal home, though all he kept there was a rented room containing a pair of pants and a vest. It was enough to maintain his voting rights in Texas. At Star Island, the Colonel maintained his habit of inviting the public onto his property. His Easter celebration became an annual event, to which hundreds of local children came to hunt eggs hidden all over the property. The Colonel personally supervised the hiding of the eggs by his staff. He handed out baskets to the children, gave them the signal to start, and laughed in delight as they tore over the property in their search. Ned shrugged off the inevitable complaints from neighbors, just as he did at Round Hill.

The Colonel’s acts of philanthropy were never terribly focused or sustained. He liked to quote his mother’s adage that paying people to work was more honorable and better for the recipient than simply giving money away. His endless projects
at both Round Hill and Star Island provided hundreds of jobs throughout the Depression and pumped millions of dollars into local economies that needed them. Despite Hetty’s dictum, the Colonel did give money away, but it was sporadic and spontaneous. In 1932, he donated $5,000 for a children’s ward at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami; when he learned that a trip to New York for the Miami Boys Drum and Bugle Corps had been canceled when the Junior Chamber of Commerce ran short of funds, Ned wrote out a check for $3,000 to cover it. In 1926, he chipped in $2,000 to the New Bedford Community Fund. He also enjoyed playing the white knight when banks ran into trouble. In 1921, he stopped a run on the Security National Bank in Dallas by depositing $100,000. A few months later he saved the First National Bank of Terrell in more dramatic fashion, placing $250,000 in cash on a table in the middle of the lobby and paying depositors until the panic subsided.

The largest single act of philanthropy by the Colonel was also one of the more intriguing. Over the years, Ned and Mabel informally adopted a series of young women, mostly the daughters of acquaintances, who cruised with them on their boats and, later, stayed with them at Round Hill. The women came to be known as the Colonel’s “wards.” Among the many things Ned did for these women was to pay for several of them to enroll at Wellesley College outside of Boston. Given the unconventional and unorthodox atmosphere that prevailed wherever the Colonel went, there were inevitable stories of sexual relations between Ned and the girls. But these rumors were never substantiated, and the girls themselves insisted Ned’s behavior toward them was proper and avuncular. Indeed, Ned was already suffering from mounting health problems, and in 1921 had undergone an unsuccessful operation to reverse impotence. It is difficult to imagine him taking advantage of the situation even if he had wanted to. Ruth Lawrence Briggs, who graduated from Wellesley in 1925 (she was the only one of the wards to actually graduate), wrote an article for the college alumni magazine in 1988, when
she was eighty-five years old. “I guess Uncle Ned took a fancy to me,” she wrote. “I don’t mean in any wrong way.” Uncle Ned bought Ruth a horse, and a car. And when Briggs was married, Mabel bought rugs for her house. Briggs’s portrait of Ned and Mabel is of a doting, older couple who, childless themselves, enjoyed having young people around.